Anti-Missile Defenses for Passenger Aircraft
It’s not happening anytime soon:
Congress agreed to pay for the development of the systems to protect the planes from such weapons, but balked at proposals to spend the billions needed to protect all 6,800 commercial U.S. airliners.
Probably for the best, actually. One, there are far more effective ways to spend that money on counterterrorism. And two, they’re only effective against a particular type of missile technology:
Both BAE and Northrop systems use lasers to jam the guidance systems of incoming missiles, which lock onto the heat of an aircraft’s engine.
White • August 3, 2006 7:59 AM
OK. So is this how Boeing and others reach out to find new business models by arming civilian structures ? Interesting, yet unaffective. I would like to see SAM sites deployed all around our capital and major points of interests. I would also like to see a better warning system for aircraft that deviate off course, instead of relying on black boxes whose secret location is not secret anymore and available for extremely intelligent hackers that learn by birth to break into uncrackable cryptographic systems before the age of 5.
Terrorism, to me, has been around since the dark ages and there is no technology that can terminate the movement. As long as governments exist, so will a peoples right to bare arms against oppression. America needs to be focusing on its psychological component overseas more than anything.